I've resolved a lot of hurdles, but i'm fighting a few issues...
Unlike my Prusa-i3, which has been working perfectly after tweaking it over the past 3 years.

My usual tricks to get PLA or ABS to stick to the bed has been met with mixed results. Kapton tape, AquaNet hair spray.
Once the print sticks, it will unstick after 10+ layers. Mostly due to the print head mashing thru not yet hardened layers and plowing thru. literally. and pushing the part out of the way.

Are you using the supplied benchy? Or your own settings? What material are you using? What print temp and what bed temp? UHU on glass works well, I just use elmers glue stick extreme, found it at the dollar store, not the purple kind, you can buy uhu online though, I also use Wolfbite nano for abs and works awesome.

Have you calibrated your esteps? It could be that too much material is being extruded causing it to plow into the print..

The benchy print is done from an already sliced design, (and works and with the supplied firmware too) so this limits the things that can be wrong to things like the printer setup itself, and not the million things possible in s3d.

As the print goes wrong after a few layers then it is possibly too much filament as a little too much extruded each layer will eventually mean it's far too high and as you say "the nozzle just ploughs through it" This ploughing does not happen in prints normally.

Some people including me have found that the 100 mm calibration does not always work, it's worth a check and if necessary just changing the parameters (without doing the sums) until it extrudes exactly 100 mm.

A crude but effective way of reducing the extrusion during a print is with the control on the front panel. Turn the control clockwisefor less !! This is a "feature" of the stock firmware, fixed I'm told in later versions. I found that a quick change to 94% reduced a lot of filament being pushed around by the nozzle.

The benchy gcode file also has it's own settings for print cooling fan speed, (lots of posts on these fans needing physical adjustment downward to within 2 to 1.5 mm of nozzle height) so too high maybe a problem in cooling the print too fast, but it sounds more like too much filament and the head just bashing the print until it comes loose.

Staff Member

A crude but effective way of reducing the extrusion during a print is with the control on the front panel. Turn the control clockwisefor less !!

Click to expand...

Sorry but I got to correct you again.
Turning the knob on the status page changes the percentage of the "feedrate" abbreviated with "F_R". The feedrate is the overall speed the machine moves so EVERY move is slowed down (less than 100%) or speeded up (>100%). The speed distribution among the moves set by the code file and thus by the slicer, like slowing down for outer lines or cooling, is retained.
I do not doubt this could help if you have extrusion problems because then the filament flow is less and so the filament has more time to melt.
But in the described case above this won't reduce the amount of filament extruded, it just takes longer...

Why is that when I try to do the extrude calibration, I get NO ACTION ?
I was able to do it before.
I even chose restore from failsafe.
Set temp to 210.
At temp selct from sd card calibration; extrude0_gcode.
The only thing that happens is the name is shown on the main screen. NO EXTRUDER MOVEMENT.
My next step is to manually change my esteps. original was 304, then 152 as per my first calibration. I'm going to try 140 and work from there.

I found out that if i DISCONNECT my OctoPi, it will behave normally. WTF!
So I ran the 100mm calibration.
Octave White PLA.
195c for the nozzle,
75c for the bed.
It actually extruded 102mm. Despite that, I lowered the esteps from 152 to 145. just to see what happens.
I cant tell definitively, because as I get more and more layers... I killed it as layer 20, the nozzle is plowing at least 1mm of previously laid filament.

No, I did verify that the correct motors are on the Z axis. X and Y have the 0.9step motors.
I did install OctoPi on the raspberry card and it did install fine. I can view and control BigBox via its web gui. But no video image.
It seems The marlin gets wonky sometimes if the octipi is connected at startup. still verifying that one.

Anyone have a link handy for the Z axis calibration so I can do it again?

There's not really a Z-axis calibration in that sense, but you can basically follow the same procedure as in the E-stepper calibration; move the Z-Axis xx mm down and measure what distance the bed travelled. The next step will be adjusting the steps per mm.

... This might be a really stupid question... did you have the right motors on Z and E?
On my build I swapped then so I had the Z steppers on E and E on Z...

This lead to Z not moving as expected like 50% since 1 pair of steppers have 0.9 degree/per step and the other 1.8
and your z height problem sounds like "it does only move 0.1 for 0.2 layer" and your e-steps on 150ish I had with 1.0 Dual about 284...

I was able to remove the Z axis motors without removing the base! delicately thru the electronics hatch!
When I get back home, I'll re-zero the Z axis, align the threaded bars and fix my dropped pincher bar washer/spring on the extruders.

Of cause 0.9 or 1.8 steppers are ok, but you have to adjust the steps/mm for every not Standard axis. And remember that every time you change the fw... or just reinstall the Std way. Options so many options

What doesn't bugging me why BB has those 1.8 for the Extruder? Do they have more power or are they lighter or cheaper?